If you missed my broad year-end preamble, click here. I also apologize in advance for the next week, as my 2022 Year in Review pieces will be bombarding your inbox. Trust me when I say that I am not nearly this productive normally.
Supporting Performances
Honorable Mentions: Paul Dano (The Fabelmans), Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin), Stephanie Hsu (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once), IU (Broker), LaShana Lynch (The Woman King), Rooney Mara (Women Talking), Daryl McCormack (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande), Janelle Monae (Glass Onion), Makita Samba (Paris, 13th District), Rachel Sennott (Bodies, Bodies, Bodies), Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans), Steven Yeun (Nope)
5. Kerry Condon | The Banshees of Inisherin
Cinema has seen myriad well-read and opinionated women toil away in small towns on whom their charms are lost, but The Banshees of Inisherin uniquely casts Kerry Condon’s Siobhan—sister to the kind but simple Padraic (Colin Farrell, who we’ll get to)—not just as the film’s rational brain but also its persistently caring heart. Condon—an accomplished theater thespian, making her right at home in McDonagh-land—excels as a woman desperately trying to keep the peace for her beloved home and brother even as she works to escape them, navigating the complex emotions of knowing deeply that you needed to leave everything you’ve ever known if you want to happy with the required sobriety, grace, and occasional exasperation.
4. Lucie Zhang | Paris, 13th District
Lucie Zhang’s Emilie is my favorite archetype of character—a whirling dervish of a woman in her twenties with no clue what she is doing both professionally and personally—but don’t confuse that with her not earning this spot on my (inherently subjective) list outright. Beyond the thrill of seeing an Asian character my age buck essentially every pertinent stereotype you can think of, it’s also just wildly fun to watch Zhang barrel through the film, a chaotic contrast to Makita Samba’s straight-laced academic and Noemie Merlant (we’ll get to her too) as the film’s well-meaning heart. In a film that lives and dies by the likability of its very messy characters, Zhang provides the film with a prickliness that feels true to anyone who’s ever been 25 and uncertain of everything. Not that I can relate.
3. Tang Wei | Decision to Leave
As with every femme fatale role worth its salt, there are two sides to Tang Wei’s turn here as Seo-rae, the potentially murderous widow at the heart of Park Chan-wook’s modern noir. The first one is the usual archetype that comes to mind when one thinks about femme fatales: Duplicitous, calculating, and adept at using her feminine wiles to inspire even the most by-the-book detectives to rampant unprofessionalism. She knocks this out of the park, of course, but it’s hardly the more interesting half of the coin. The second is the human undercurrent that elevates this archetype into a living, breathing person: The capacity for hurt or fear or (most terrifyingly) love. It’s here where Tang Wei—who isn’t new to playing the femme fatale role with Lust, Caution and Long Day’s Journey Into Night also on her resume—really shines, burrowing herself into your brain before breaking your heart.
2. Dolly de Leon | Triangle of Sadness
#PinoyPride!!!
Jokes aside, Dolly de Leon’s Abigail is the lynchpin of Triangle of Sadness, particularly in a third act whose only reason for being seems to be for her to show out. I’m not mad about it. In the abstract, her role’s existence is perhaps the best encapsulation of director Ruben Ostlund’s directionally correct but ultimately ham-fisted storytelling, but in de Leon’s hands, a character that could’ve been simply an anvillicious idea is imbibed with generations’ worth of history and life. Among an ensemble cast mostly occupied by cartoon characters and oriented towards a fairly elementary session of Eat The Rich 101, Dolly de Leon gives Triangle of Sadness some genuine stakes, culminating in a last five minutes worthy of an Oscar.
(We are speaking it into existence, ladies and gentlemen.)
1. Noemie Merlant | Tar + Paris, 13th District
Noemie Merlant doesn’t appear once in the first trailer for Tar. I’d like to think that was intentional, an oblique commentary on how much of a non-person her Francesca is in the eyes of her titular ostensible mentor. The virtuosity of her performance here is similarly easy to miss, all subtle glances and half-spoken words whose hesitations feel perfectly calibrated. In a film where everyone is great at looking at people, she goes above and beyond. Her glare conveys admiration, frustration, condemnation, and sometimes two or three of those at once. Best known for being one of the leads in perhaps the best looking-at-people movie of the last 10 years in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Merlant unsurprisingly brings that same energy here.
In Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District, Merlant gets a more conventional role as one corner of the film’s unspoken love quadrilateral: A college student named Nora who has to navigate school politics, situation-ships, and a burgeoning fascination with cam-girl Amber Sweet, for whom she is mistaken at a party with awful consequences. In a chattier, less brooding role than international audiences have seen her in, Merlant employs a different gear as a girl from the country in over her head before she learns how to swim, and if you’re interested at all in seeing the next great actress do her thing, you ought to catch this one.
And if you just want to see her punch someone on the street, she does that here too. The range: That’s why she’s my #1.
Lead Performances
Honorable Mentions: Austin Butler (Elvis), Ram Charan (RRR), Frankie Corio (Aftersun), Tom Cruise (Top Gun: Maverick), Sheila Francisco (Leonor Will Never Die), Laura Galan (Piggy), Mia Goth (Pearl + X), Jack Lowden (Benediction), Aubrey Plaza (Emily the Criminal), Lea Seydoux (One Fine Morning), Tilda Swinton (The Eternal Daughter), Emma Thompson (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande), Daniel Zolghadri (Funny Pages)
5. Anna Cobb | We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
At once the year’s most enigmatic and emotionally naked performance, Anna Cobb’s turn in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair brings to life that age-old conundrum of Internet personas: The ways in which people are simultaneously the most and the least themselves online. We don’t learn too much about her Casey, and whatever we do learn is shrouded in the uncertainty of online performance. There is an uncanny-valley aspect to this portrait of knowing someone through a screen, which betrays the deep neglect and depression at the heart of this roundabout cinematic SOS. She brings to agonizing life the sort of despair anyone who’s been lonely online is achingly familiar with. We know its face.
4. Colin Farrell | The Banshees of Inisherin + After Yang
Over a career spanning more than two decades, Colin Farrell has cornered the market on roles that demand a certain befuddled melancholy, and his two lead roles this year are both characters who are smart enough to know that something is amiss, but not quite so smart that they know how to fix it—in other words, Colin Farrell characters. As sad-dad Jake in Kogonada’s Ozu-esque sci-fi meditation After Yang, Farrell does his best Chishu Ryu, all soulful glances and pensive gazes as a father simply doing his best by his daughter. Meanwhile, he brings a more wryly comedic variation on a similar role to his simple but kind Padraic in The Banshees of Inisherin, his long-awaited reunion with In Bruges collaborators Martin McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson, ramping up the confusion with minor-key grace notes. The latter turn is garnering the Oscar buzz and deservedly so, but both of Farrell’s 2022 turns taken together embody just how inimitable his brand of sad-sack is. We are lucky to have him.
3. Park Ji-min | Return to Seoul
Park Ji-min’s Freddy is a hurricane. Returning to Seoul in search of some nebulous purpose after being put up for adoption by her Korean mother and moving to France as an infant, she storms through her motherland, a walking chaos agent in search of love, sex, and answers. Her notion of relationships is mostly transactional, yet she finds herself simultaneously yearning for something unconditional yet recoiling with skepticism when it is offered. Park does justice to the complex contradictions that sort of dynamic entails. It’s a turn that understands deeply the trauma of being failed by those who were supposed to love you, and the ecstatic fear that comes when you are in turn loved by the same world that once failed you. It is unforgettable.
2. Michelle Yeoh | Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
There are great performances, and then there are singular ones: Those that could only be delivered by one specific actor, by virtue of their unique gravitas and inimitable presence. Still, to say that Michelle Yeoh’s turn in the Daniels’ breakout comedy is special solely due to its call-backs to Yeoh’s one-of-a-kind oeuvre is to sell her short; her Evelyn Wang is built on both echoes of her old work and something unmistakably new. Her turn here is a palimpsest of four decades’ worth of films across several continents, refracted through peerless craft and hard-won, unmanufacturable Movie Star Energy. The Oscar buzz around her this year is well-deserved, but it’d only be a footnote in the legacy of one of cinema’s greatest icons. Let this performance remind just how she became a legend.
1. Cate Blanchett | Tar
It’s difficult to avoid drawing comparisons between the year’s two best turns, and not just because awards season is about to pit them against and alongside each other ad nauseum. Both performances feel unimaginable coming from anyone else, and both of their films would collapse if their leads were even just a note off. However, while Yeoh’s Evelyn is constantly in conversation with her own oeuvre, Cate Blanchett is unrecognizable and chameleon-like as the titular Lydia Tar, the (very real, we’ve met) brilliant and terrible Bernstein-level genius conductor whose carefully manicured life crumbles slowly and then all at once. She is both black-box and echo-chamber: A self-contained ocean of anger and insecurity, a puppeteer losing control of her marionettes in record time. Seemingly out of thin air, she animates a character who already feels like a future icon: Charles Foster Kane with a closet of smart pantsuits and a thing for twentysomething cellists.
It’s not only the best performance of the year, but also the best of Blanchett’s illustrious career. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, put Tar on and see God.
Comments? Criticisms? Outrage at the lack of male representation on a Deany Cheng list? If it’s the latter, then you must be new here. Either way, leave a comment below!